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Potato Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling, mashing potatoes, adding salt, sugar, and old yeast, then letting it rise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Mash the potatoes finely and thin with the boiling water.

Make the starter

  1. Add coarse sea salt and brown sugar.

  2. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm.

  3. Stir in the old yeast.

  4. Cover and place in a cool place to rise.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch and body, which the yeast feeds on during fermentation.
Old yeast
Leavens the starter by fermenting sugars and producing gas that makes it rise.
Brown sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source, speeding up fermentation and adding a little flavour.
Water from boiling potatoes
Thins the mashed potatoes to a workable consistency and carries starch into the mixture.

The step that matters

Cooling to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast cells are killed by high heat. Adding yeast to a hot mixture can stop fermentation, so the mixture should be cooled to lukewarm first to keep the yeast alive and active.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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